Think of the most iconic rock album covers of all time from the 1970s: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy and Presence, T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, Paul McCartney & Wings’ Band On The Run, AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, all of Peter Gabriel’s early albums, etc. Most of the striking, bold, enigmatic, and sometimes confounding in concept. They were all created by Hipgnosis, the English art design group founded by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell, and later joined by Peter Christopherson (who would go on to join the art-noise group Throbbing Gristle).
In the 1970s, up until the early 1980s when they disbanded, Hipgnosis rock album art was ubiquitous, and in the case of Pink Floyd, their constant companion in creating their visual identity: unusual, inscrutable artwork that always made the viewer lean closer to ask what it all meant (see the random cow on the cover of Atom Heart Mothers or a floating pig in the sky surrounded by an industrial complex in Animals). Directed by Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn, his new doc, “Squaring The Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis,” certainly has much personal investment in it.
READ MORE: Telluride 2022 Preview: 12 Must-See Films To Watch
To modern cineastes, Corbijn is known for his moody assassin and spy thrillers, “The American” (2010) “A Most Wanted Man” (2014). But his debut, “Control,” about singer Ian Curtis and seminal post-punk rockers Joy Division and, “Life,” about the friendship between James Dean and a photographer at Life magazine, speaks to his two initial obsessions: music and photography. Before his career as a filmmaker, Corbijn became a legendary rock-music photographer, helping craft the visual identities of bands like Depeche Mode, U2, Echo and The Bunnymen in the pages of NME and the likes and then going on to direct dozens of music videos for many of these bands and more (Metallica, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Nirvana and more).
Corbijn marries all these preoccupations, and obviously the early roots of his music fixations, in his first feature-length documentary, “Squaring The Circle,” an entertaining and enlightening tale about the genesis and rise and fall of the seminal design studio Hipgnosis.
READ MORE: Fall 2022 Preview: 60+ Must-See Films To Watch
Featuring talking heads like Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and David Gilmour, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney, 80s designer Peter Saville, Peter Gabriel, and Oasis’ Noel Gallagher for a younger man’s perspective of obsessing and pouring over the same mysterious album artwork, while the doc may seem a little traditional and familiar in aesthetic shape, these veterans tell terrific, funny stories that really put Hipgnosis’ design legend status in context. Plus, Corbijn is such a remarkable visualist first and foremost, these black-and-white interviews are the most amazingly lit, framed, and composed testimonies you’ve seen in ages.
Their elusive name, seemingly accidentally coined by Pink Floyd’s waywardly adrift member Syd Barrett after he misspelled it with graffiti (though this detail is contested by more than a few people), the unintentional name was meant to convey hip and groovy and gnostic, meaning wise.
Told primarily through the POV of the only remaining living member Aubrey “Po” Powell (Thorgerson passed away in 2013), this Hipgnosis member, seemingly the most practical of the bunch, gives a candid assessment of their highs and lows, rounded out by archival interviews with Thorgerson and Christopherson, friends and family who were there, and the aforementioned rock gods weighing in on their artistry.
Hipgnosis was the brainchild of Powell and Thorgerson— the former an untrained photographer who quickly learned everything he could once he got a taste for the magic of photography and photo development—but even Powell would probably admit the duo wouldn’t have been created if it weren’t for the brash, cocksure energy, ideas and conviction of Thorgerson, an irascible personality, but the driving conceptual force behind the team (Roger Waters describes him as “one of the most annoying people in the world, but also the most lovable, the bravest”).
Hipgnosis began almost by accident when living in a bohemian flat where Syd Barrett and members of Pink Floyd would convene for parties, drugs, girls, and radical thinking. Soon, Hipgnosis and Floyd (particularly Thorgerson and Waters), became thick as thieves, and the design studio became an integral part of the psychedelic band’s visual identity, creating the cover for nearly all their albums in the 1970s including the iconic Dark Side Of The Moon, and the caustically ironic music industry commentary from Wish You Were Here, which famously featured a man in a suit on fire shaking hands with another man (meant to suggest the ruthless nature of the rock music industry and all its betrayals).
Thorgerson’s cantankerous, unpredictable nature shapes much of the narrative, too, from wildly ambitious (and sometimes nonsensical) ideas to severely expensive ones where he would not give a f*ck about the budget; this Hipgnosis member was purely driven by conceptual art’s sake. But his uncompromising mien and financial irresponsibility would eventually be their downfall. Perhaps the greatest, most hilarious anecdote was his central contradiction. Thorgerson was positioned as the artistic purist of the group, the man with the best, most inventive, and radical ideas, but later on, it’s revealed, so as not to lose a buck, they passed on album reject ideas to other bands who believed they were original and paid top dollar for them (even Paul McCartney is revealed to have been duped and seems rather annoyed that a singles cover for “Getting Closer,” was a castoff pawned off on him. ‘They’re hucksters; everyone’s trying to float an idea,” Robert Plant says at one point).
Excess, self-indulgence, and infuriatingly high standards—much of it Thorgerson’s doing, much to the chagrin of put-out record labels— are prevailing themes too. As bands like Zeppelin and Floyd became world-renowned superstars, and the ornate extravagance of prog-rock became more popular, Hipgnosis’ ideas became more grand, ambitious, sillier, wilder, and of course, super expensive. “Hipgnosis intrinsically linked to rock excess,” says Peter Saville, the Factory Records graphic designer and art director minimalist who is mostly there to throw digs at the doc’s subject matter throughout.
Chaptered into little sections that chronicle the story of the making of the art of these iconic covers, many of these stories are incredibly captivating, including many of the arguments with Led Zeppelin’s notoriously volatile and tightfisted manager Peter Grant. Grant was so perturbed by the skyrocketing costs of Hipgnosis projects, he told the duo Zeppelin covers would sell millions regardless, even if they were wrapped in a brown paper bag. Hipgnosis said, why don’t you f*cking do that then? And he did that very thing for the outer sleeve of their final album, In Through The Out Door.
Hipgnosis eventually fell apart due to financial mismanagement, infighting, and the fleeting trends of pop culture—’80s new wave had rejected 1970s overindulgence— but without playing a note, the design studio forever changed the landscape of rock music, creating many of the most recognizable album covers of all time. Unpretentious and unassuming, but effective, Corbijn creates his own cozy, sleeve for these trailblazers to get their due and creates a must-watch for rockologists everywhere in the process. [B+]
Follow along with all our coverage of the 2022 Telluride Film Festival.
